My Korean Mother and I Speak to the Dead
My Korean Mother and I Speak to the Dead Ghost stories are a way for Alex Laughlin and her mother to acknowledge the trauma and grief of the Korean diaspora.
I met my first ghost when I was eight.
We lived on Schofield Barracks at the time, an Army base established in 1908 to defend what was then the United States’ new territory, Hawaii. I was sleeping over with a friend who lived in colonel’s housing, which, unlike our cinder block duplex, was a standalone bungalow with a courtyard in the middle. The house had a servant’s quarters with its own bathroom, which the family used as a playroom. Those old houses were perfect for playing pretend; the architecture of the buildings revealed the handprints of generations past, the spectral servants who had cared for military families like ours.
Design by Ingrid Frahm
When I was four years old, I turned up to school in uniform on a day I wasn’t supposed to. I went to the school’s front desk and asked to call my dad to have him bring me my favorite outfit, a can of 7UP, and some sausage rolls. It was a brazen request that came from an assurance that my dad would always be there for me. When I was a bit older, and he fell ill, I believed that he would survive. My dad wasn’t supposed to die. He was supposed to walk up to the front of the congregation at our church to give his testimony of his survival. Everyone would stand up and join in praising God for such a miracle. When my dad died, it didn’t feel real. At 14, I had no direct encounter with death, nor did I know the weight it held in my culture. As the 10-year anniversary arrives this year, I’m still trying to figure it out.